Infotech Category

Dr. Anand Chandrasekaran

Most enterprise applications today are available only for desktop computers, not wireless handheld devices carried by employees in the field. An in-field person normally has to come back to his office to record his work resulting in inefficiencies and slowness in the business process. Anand Chandrasekaran designed the Mobile Workflow Management system to solve this problem, and co-founded Aeroprise based on it. With customers in 6 countries, clients like Dartmouth college, Harvard university, and IBM, and the product being sold through carrier partners like AT&T wireless, Nextel, and O2, and T-mobile.

Anand Chandrasekaran embodies true entrepreneurial spirit in taking this system that began with his earlier venture while a student at Stanford university, Khwaish Inc, to market to final customers and building a successful company around it.

He received his BS from PSG College of Technology, India and MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford university.

Dr. Venu Govindaraju

Imagine manually sorting out more than 650 million hand-written (by different people) daily, and the savings made if the process is automated. This is what Professor Venu Govindaraju led research group at the Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR), University of Buffalo has managed to do. CEDAR's Handwritten Address Interpretation (HWAI) technology has saved USPS a few hundred million dollars a year, and has also been recently licensed by UK Royal Mail and Australia Post.

He also has research projects in biometrics, including fingerprint and face recognition -- another work of potentially great impact in security, forensics, and many more areas. He is also interested in data mining and human computer interaction, co-authoring more than 140 scientific papers.

He received a B-Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science at the University at Buffalo (UB), and is now a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UB, State University of New York.

Dr. Vijay Manwani

Vijay is a co-founder, Chief Technology Officer and a member of the Board of Directors of BladeLogic, and is responsible for the companyís overall product strategy and direction. Previously, Vijay led all phases of the companyís development efforts which resulted in BladeLogicís current product leadership position. Before BladeLogic, Vijay was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Battery Ventures where he spent the bulk of his time working to launch BladeLogic. Earlier, Vijay was the CTO at Breakaway Solutions where he was responsible for all technology initiatives in the ASP and eBusiness lines of businesses. Prior to Breakaway, Vijay was the CTO and co-founder of Eggrock Partners, an ASP/eBusiness-consulting firm that was acquired by Breakaway Solutions.

Vijay is recognized as one the most thoughtful and experienced software technologists in the industry with a long track record of success. In his 17 year career, Vijay has held technology positions of increasing responsibility at Unisys, TCI and Cambridge Technology Partners. He holds a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Pune University, India. In addition, he serves on several technical advisory boards, holds two patents and has co-authored a book on eCommerce with two Harvard Business School professors.

Dr. Kumar Sivarajan

Kumar Sivarajan is considered by many as one of the early pioneers in the field of optical networking. A winner of numerous prestigious awards for his research and academic work, Dr. Sivarajan is also the author of "Optical Networks: A Practical Perspective", the most widely used textbook in the field. Apart from being a world-renowned technology innovator, Sivarajan is also leading a company, that one hopes, will pioneer a new technological trend in India. Tejas Networks is one of a small band of technology product start-ups based in India and as a product company, Tejas has achieved significant success over the last year, acquiring many of the Indian telecommunications carriers, as well as some international ones, as customers. As the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Tejas Networks, Dr. Sivarajan guides the development of the next-generation SDH/SONET optical transmission products at Tejas. In felicitating him as a technovator, we acknowledge his contributions to optical communications technology and his role in nurturing a product-centric technology venture in India.

Prior to co-founding Tejas, Kumar served as a faculty member with the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and with the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, New York. A Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, Sivarajan received his MS and PhD from the California Institute of Technology and is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.